Thursday, June 29, 2006

Do you like golf? Or do you just hate people who aren't boring?

Seriously. Fog. FOG.Not a fiber optic gyroscope (FOG), the U.S.S. Fogg, John Carpenter's The Fog, not the fog of war (nor the shadow of the future), not Phileas Fogg, nor Josh Fogg, just plain ordinary fog. FOG???

The Indy 500 delayed by fog, I'll buy that, there's genuine peril in driving in fog (that said, it's auto racing, not going to rank #1 on my list of things I consider sports, it's right above curling). This ends the list of sports delayed by fog. Baseball has a credible claim (just ask Ray Chapman), but I've never seen a game undergo a fog delay. Football, they play through anything except lightning, there's no such thing as a weather delay. Baseball, if it's pouring rain, they delay it.

In golf? It really doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference if it's foggy. Maybe they're doing it because they're worried the fans won't see enough, but how much are they going to see anyway? If you're at the tee, you see Annika Sorenstam swing the club and the ball go off somewhere where you couldn't see it anyway. Even if it's pea soup fog, you know what, you've got a caddy, his job will be to find the ball if the Golf Channel doesn't first. And maybe it's the TV networks that are delaying it, but again, NFL games get played through fog, so I don't see why broadcasting golf in fog would be so impossible, except that it might add an element of something interesting, which would infuriate the PGA/LPGA, who limit their areas of potentially interesting occurrences to Phil Mickelson sucking and Annika Sorenstam playing with men, proving once and for all that women and men are both equal at boring the shit out of me.